james mckay dot net

Some years ago, I received an e-mail message consisting of the following instruction:

James, please deal with this by COP today.

followed by thirty or so screenfuls of the sender’s correspondence with the other interested parties. Half of this consisted of the typical lengthy disclaimers that corporate e-mail systems add to all outgoing messages by default, of the other half, 90% was of only tangential relevance to what he actually wanted me to do, and even after I had waded through the entire e-mail, I was still unclear as to what exactly he was asking for. On top of that, this was the first time I had ever encountered the cryptic abbreviation “COP” meaning “Close of Play,” so I had no idea what he meant. He had obviously just hurriedly and lazily hit “Forward” in his e-mail client, appended a quick note, and left me to untangle the mess.

Folks, don’t do this. It simply isn’t fair on someone to expect them to spend half an hour wading through thirty screenfuls of noise to filter out your instructions, when you could just as easily spend a couple of minutes including a summary at the top, and trimming out the extraneous, irrelevant waffle if necessary. Unfortunately, this particular individual made a habit of doing this kind of thing, and it annoyed me no end.

Besides, e-mail is not a suitable medium for communicating requirements that need to be dealt with by COP today. Your recipient may not be at their desk, or may have their e-mail client turned off, or may have a hundred other messages that also need to be dealt with by COP today, or the message may have been trapped in their spam filter. If it is time sensitive, a telephone call is more appropriate.

Comments closed (2) »

Posted at 14:35 on 14 August 2009.
Tagged: communication, e-mail

I thought I’d better mention this because one or two people have been giving out the wrong e-mail address for me, and it could cause delays in getting your message through to me.

The e-mail address that I use for personal e-mail is the one that appears in the right hand sidebar on my blog (“thecooldude” address at james mckay dot net). This is the address that you should use for anything not related to my employment as it has survived three changes of job in the past five and a half years and is likely to remain stable for as long as the domain jamesmckay.net remains under my control.

Although my personal e-mail gets forwarded on to my GMail account, I don’t publicise my GMail address for two reasons. First, I’ve set it up to highlight e-mail which gets sent to my “official” personal address as warranting my special attention, so anything that goes direct to my GMail address instead runs the risk of getting lost in the torrent of newsletters, invoices, Facebook spam and other floccinaucities. Second, I am not making any commitment to using GMail for this purpose indefinitely, so one way or another, Your Mileage May Vary if you send mail direct to that address.

My work e-mail address should only be used for matters related to my work. Needless to say, my old e-mail addresses at my former employers (james.mckay@eurekastep.com and james.mckay@kingdomfaith.com) are ancient history and no longer reach me.

Comments closed »

Posted at 20:53 on 9 February 2009.
Tagged: e-mail

By some strange quirk of Google, I tend to hover around the top of the listing for a search for “James McKay”. Here in Blighty, I seem to be jostling for the top spot with a criminal defence solicitor in Elgin, Scotland, but in most of the rest of the world, “I’m feeling lucky” sends the average punter to yours truly.

Now this namesake of mine may or may not be a distant relative, but he is not me. Unless of course it is somehow possible to simultaneously be both a web developer in the south of England and a criminal defence solicitor in the north of Scotland and be totally unaware of the fact. However, while that may be the case on TV programmes like Stargate SG-1, it doesn’t happen in real life.

We also both share our name with, among others, the author of a book on ferrets, a nineteenth century Canadian politician, a historian at the University of Birmingham, and thousands of other random individuals in Scotland, England, the USA, Canada and everywhere else you could possibly imagine. There are no less than 147 of us on Facebook.

As you can imagine, occasionally I get e-mails or Skype messages or whatever out of the blue from people whose names I don’t recognise, addressing me as if we’ve known each other for years. Just to make things slightly complicated, we may actually have met before. Is it really appropriate to say bluntly to them, “Sorry, who are you?” in such cases?

I may have met them when I worked with my father, for instance. As a well respected Bible teacher, author and public speaker, he enjoyed something of a minor celebrity status in some Christian circles, and inevitably some of that rubbed off onto me, and as a result, I got to meet a lot of people. Unfortunately, I am not the best person in the world at remembering people and putting names to faces, so that complicates things a little bit.

Facebook friend requests are easy. Especially if we have a mutual friend: I can fire off a message to them and ask them to jog my memory and spare me any embarrassment, if I am still puzzled by the person concerned’s profile page. Other means of communication are slightly more complicated, however, since I am then faced with the task of breaking it gently to them that rather than being the close friend they expect, I may in fact be a complete stranger.

Don’t let this put you off from getting in touch with me of course. I’ve no objections to widening my social circle, or renewing old acquaintances, and as long as I can establish that you’re not an axe-murderer and you’re not trying to sell me viagra, cheap mortgages or pirated software, I won’t mind. And please don’t be offended if my memory of you falls short of your expectations: if we have met, you may just have fallen foul of the absent minded side of me, especially if it’s been a long time. However, if you are looking for a criminal defence solicitor, a ferret expert or a historian, I’m afraid I can’t help you.

Comments closed »

Posted at 23:30 on 9 November 2007.
Tagged: e-mail

I clicked the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of an e-newsletter from the kind of company that I tend to think of as being fairly reputable.

Admittedly, it was one of those companies that require you to register on their website before downloading their software, and demand all sorts of intrusive and unnecessary information such as what you had for breakfast and which football team you support. Don’t you just hate it when they do that?

The message said, “Thank you for unsubscribing. We will process your request within five working days.”

Five working days?!!

Excuse me, but it so happens that back in the dim and distant past I actually wrote an in-house e-newsletter program, and I know for a fact that it does not take five working days to unsubscribe someone’s e-mail address. In fact if it takes anywhere near five seconds, your architecture is completely wonky.

That part of the application is so easy to write that the kids that sell burgers at McDonald’s could do it. It’s a single SQL DELETE statement, that’s all.

This wasn’t the first time I’d unsubscribed from this particular newsletter either. Nor are they the only company that does something like this — another one said that it would take ten working days.

Sometimes I wonder if they do things like that so that your “unsubscribed” e-mail address can accidentallyonpurpose “slip through the cracks” when they consolidate their mailing lists with addresses from other departments or companies.

I thought there were laws against this kind of thing.

Is it any wonder that young people these days are eschewing e-mail in favour of IM and Facebook, when even reputable companies are acting in ways more befitting of spammers?

Comments closed »

Posted at 14:00 on 22 October 2007.
Tagged: e-mail, e-newsletters, idiocy

I got an e-mail yesterday from someone asking me this:

I have read one of your answers to a problem someone was having and you suggested to add a – Select – in the drop down list.

I had already done that, but how do I do the validator to check that this – Select – is not still there.

I think what she means is: “how do I add a validator to my ASP.NET web application to make sure that the user has not left a drop down list at the default option (“Select one” or whatever)?”

The answer is: use a RequiredFieldValidator control. Set its InitialValue property to the value of the default option in the list, that you don’t want your users to choose, and the ControlToValidate property to the ID of the drop down list.

But that is not the point of this blog entry.

I get questions like this every so often from people who have read something that I have written on some forum system or other. If you are good with computers and active in an online community, it goes with the territory, I guess. People see that you know your stuff and come directly to you for advice.

This is usually not the best idea. It is far better to post your question on a public forum where everyone can see it and have a stab at giving you an answer. There are several reasons for this.

First, someone else may be asking the same question as you and could also benefit from the answer.

Second, you are likely to get an answer much more quickly that way. On active developers’ forums, there are always hundreds of people online at any one time ready and able to answer your question straight away. On the other hand, we developers often have to prioritise, and questions from strangers asking for free advice tend to get pushed down to the bottom of the pile when we are busy.

Third, I might not be the best person to answer your question in the first place. There may be other people who know more about what you are asking than I do, or it may be the kind of question that requires some discussion in order to be resolved and clear up some misunderstandings.

Finally, I simply may not have time to answer your question. I may be facing a tight deadline, or on a camping holiday and offline for the week. As a rule, we developers only contribute to forums when we can give an answer off the tops of our heads. Time doing research and/or looking things up tends to be reserved for our paying clients, our day jobs, and our own projects.

I’m not writing this to whine, or to get at anybody, but to point people in the right direction. By participating in online communities such as forums, a lot of people can benefit who would not otherwise if it were just a private conversation between you and me.

Comments closed »

Posted at 08:30 on 18 July 2007.
Tagged: e-mail, forums, help